Singapore to strengthen skills of cybersecurity professionals in govt and CII sectors

Nurdianah Md Nur |
Sept. 19, 2017

The CSA Academy, which is set to be launched later this year, will offer customised courses through industry partners such as FireEye.

Credit :Freerange

In a bid to strengthen Singapore's cyber defence capabilities, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) will be launching a new academy in the republic in the later part of this year.

Called the CSA Academy, the academy will partner industry partners to provide intermediate to advanced training to cybersecurity professionals in the government and critical information infrastructure sectors.

US-based FireEye will be the academy's first industry partner. It will provide customised courses in incident response and malware analysis, Mr Teo Chee Hean, Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security, announced at the Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW) earlier today (19 September 2017).

Commenting on the move, FireEye Chief Executive Officer Kevin Mandia, said: "We are proud to build the capabilities of Singapore's cybersecurity professionals who serve on the frontlines and help protect Singapore and its critical information infrastructure from attackers. Singapore's efforts in this area will help cement its strategic leadership in cyber security in the region."

David Koh, Chief Executive, CSA, added: "The CSA Academy was mooted to better train our cyber defenders, and equip them with the right skills and expertise to defend our networks. We are glad to have FireEye on board with us to provide customised training for our cyber defenders. We welcome more industry partners to join us in this endeavour to raise the quality of cybersecurity professionals in Singapore."

To further enhance Singapore's overall cybersecurity, CSA Academy will be expanded to train the cybersecurity professionals for the wider community in future, said DPM Teo.

Other efforts to fortify Singapore's cyber defences

Singapore has taken various steps to bolster its cybersecurity posture. Earlier this year, the republic launched a "Defence Cyber Organisation to focus its defence efforts and a new Cyber Vocation for its national service conscripts", said DPM Teo.

Understanding that it is critical to strengthen the resilience of its essential services in the physical world, CSA conducted the second run of Exercise Cyber Star in July 2017. The exercise tests the emergency incident response capabilities of critical information infrastructure (CII) owners from 11 sectors.

In addition, the Singapore government has developed a new cybersecurity bill to enable it to take pre-emptive actions to protect against cyberthreats and improve its capabilities to respond to incidents, DPM Teo shared. The draft bill was put up for public consultation from July to August this year and the bill will be introduced in parliament next year.

Besides that, Singapore will strengthen cooperation among national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) in order to address cyberthreats effectively.

"[For instance,] when CSA discovered some active malware targeting a particular vulnerability last year, SingCERT informed counterparts in India on the potential threats to some of their computer systems. This enabled the latter to swiftly investigate and take action," he added.